About the Talk

Even the cleanest Ruby codebases can become littered over time with nil checks, error handling, and other interruptions which steal attention away from the essential purpose of the code. This talk will discuss strategies for writing your Ruby classes and methods in a confident, straightforward style; without sacrificing functionality or robustness. In the process, we'll cover concepts and techniques points including:

The narrative style of method construction

The four parts of a method

Three strategies for dealing with uncertain input

Massaging input with coercion and the Decorator pattern

Lightweight preconditions

Exterminating nils from your code

The chaining and iterative styles of method construction

Eliminating conditionals with the Special Case and Null Object patterns